A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud

The Prodigy Burned Out. Why Not Blame Mom?
By CARLIN ROMANO
DISASTER WAS MY GOD

A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud

By Bruce Duffy

360 pages. Doubleday. $27.95.
Few artists willingly give up their art. Remember Nureyev’s continuing to dance despite a damaged body that could no longer take him to the heights? Young artists who make a splash are even less likely to change course, typically seeking to climb higher, the faster the better.

So Arthur Rimbaud, who abandoned his groundbreaking poetry after four spectacular years in his teens and died at 37 in 1891, still stands out, the angel and enigma of French literature. His champions, from André Breton to John Ashbery, have celebrated him as the forerunner of literary Modernism, a rebel against tepid rationalism in poetry. Yet precisely because his devotees insist on Rimbaud’s poetry as a revolutionary feat, his later disdain for it remains a puzzle and a rebuke. Why did he stop writing poetry at 20 and become an adventurer who spent a decade in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) as a merchant and gun runner before his death in a Marseille hospital?

Enid Starkie, in her classic 1936 biography, attributed Rimbaud’s “maladjustment” to his supposed rape by French soldiers, a surmise rejected by Edmund White in his 2008 study. Graham Robb, in his 2000 life of the poet, dismissed aggressive guesses about Rimbaud’s thinking. Even if Rimbaud is now a hero to Beat poets, intellectual rock stars, gay activists and teenage rebels (Breton called the writer “a veritable god of puberty”), Mr. Robb argues that the scant evidence means “there are at least as many Rimbauds as there are personae in his work.”

Bruce Duffy, however, comes to the task with a novelist’s freedom. In his 1987 novel, “The World as I Found It,” he sought to capture the equally challenging figure of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In “Disaster Was My God,” his third novel, he takes a crack at the enduring Rimbaud mystery.

As the director Agnieszka Holland did in her nervy 1995 film, “Total Eclipse,” in which a young Leonardo DiCaprio brought Brat-Pack impudence to portraying Rimbaud, Mr. Duffy focuses on the headlines of this poet’s eventful life. Mr. Duffy, though, has the luxury of hundreds of pages of play-by-play, and it makes that life more comprehensible.

Here, as in all renditions of the story, Rimbaud, the brilliant, sneering student from Ardennes hits Paris and turns things topsy-turvy among the Parnassian poets of the time. Declaring that the poet must become a “seer” through a “derangement of all the senses,” he reinvents poetry’s mission while advancing free verse, raw diction and phantasmagoric imagery. (“A hare stopped in the clover and swinging flower bells, and said its prayer through the spider’s web to the rainbow.”)

Rimbaud’s brawling affair with his mentor, Paul Verlaine, destroys Verlaine’s bourgeois marriage and scandalizes literary Paris. The two storm off to London and Brussels, where Verlaine shoots and wounds Rimbaud and goes to prison for it. The relationship over, Rimbaud renounces literature and begins a restless post-literary life, ending up a businessman in Africa.

Mr. Duffy’s strategy is to flesh out the intense relationship biographers have established between Rimbaud and his rigid Roman Catholic mother, to elevate it to equal status with the connection to Verlaine, which dominates Ms. Holland’s film.

That approach allows Mr. Duffy to supply answers to the question, “How, in short, could a poet of genius systematically erase his own life — unwrite it?” Mr. Duffy suggests, for one thing, that Rimbaud wanted to impress his mother, who didn’t care for all that literary rot.

When his boss in Africa inquires about his former calling, Rimbaud refuses to discuss his “inanities.” He explains: “Yes, I wrote them, I suppose, but so what? I cannot help them now. They are like children, or rather, estranged children.” He says he no longer reads “any of that creative nonsense.”

Mrs. MacDonald, an Englishwoman whom Mr. Duffy invents to accompany Rimbaud on his final journey to the hospital in Marseille, extracts more information when she first asks: “Why, ever, did you write poems, Mr. Rimbaud? A man such as yourself.” And persists: “Surely you can tell me. Purely entre nous.”

“I do not think of it — ever,” Rimbaud replies. Sounding more post- than pre-Modernist, he asks: “What do I care who might like my little monsters? These things, these mere artifacts, these youthful slops, they are not me,” adding, “there is no ‘author,’ so-called.”

As for Verlaine, he gets a blunt answer to the mystery of Rimbaud’s career change when he meets him for the last time, in Germany, 18 months after the shooting.

“Art is stupid and a lie and, above all, useless,” Rimbaud tells him. The mature Rimbaud shuns “the clever, the arty, the smug” and is “increasingly horrified by the cynicism, the selfishness and the rampant irresponsibility of writing.” Instead he has turned to “Newspapers. Technical publications. Journals of exploration,” things he considers real. (He sounds a bit like Philip Roth, who recently announced that he didn’t read fiction anymore.)

Mr. Duffy’s take on the Rimbaud mystery shapes a novel that both annoys and pleases. The author’s fondness for Americanisms — thumbnailing young Rimbaud as “a chicken-hawk’s dream,” for instance — can make it seem as if Rimbaud ran off to Times Square rather than to St.-Germain.

At the same time, Mr. Duffy’s hyperbolic prose style — not quite David Foster Wallace, but still wordy — grows on you. It’s also fun to hang around with Rimbaud and Verlaine without being stabbed or shot.

“Disaster Was My God” delivers a Rimbaud who forces literary true believers to ponder an unwelcome thought: that artistic ambition may sometimes be, as the guidance counselors say, just a phase that troubled teens — even geniuses — go through.

Carlin Romano, critic at large of The Chronicle of Higher Education and a professor of philosophy and humanities at Ursinus College, is the author of “America the Philosophical,” to be published by Alfred A. Knopf.